For commercial agent Grant Turner, the prospect of winning an industrial listing came with a substantial task: preparing an information memorandum that he estimated would take more than 20 hours to assemble.
That experience helped shape IM360, the Ray White Commercial CSR project that took first place in the customer competition at REA Group’s 2026 Hackdays.
Presenting the idea, Turner described the time and effort involved in producing a professional document that brings together the information buyers need to assess a commercial property.
The team developed a prototype designed to draw on REA’s property information and digital tools to create an interactive information memorandum, with scope to reflect an agency’s existing branding.
It was one of three winning ideas built around familiar parts of an agent’s working day, alongside managing rental inspection enquiries and preparing a listing for market.
REA Executive General Manager – Sales Gerard Connell said the customer projects shared a practical ambition.
“Take friction out of our processes, out of our businesses,” he said.
Speaking to Elite Agent during the event, Connell said repetitive tasks and growing complexity were recurring themes in conversations with customers. Their ideas also focused on using information earlier, helping agents improve a campaign before it went live.
“So there’s some pretty cool ideas about before something goes out into market, how do we make it really well positioned to the target market,” he said.
Held at REA’s Melbourne headquarters from 7–10 September, Hackdays brought 10 selected customers into the full program to work alongside teams spanning technology, design, marketing and other parts of the business.
Ray White Upper North Shore’s Agent Angel placed second, with a prototype addressing the volume of rental enquiries and the work involved in coordinating inspections.
The team demonstrated a proposed assistant that could help answer common questions, collect renters’ preferred inspection times and support the organisation of inspection demand.
Connell said a conversation with a property manager had illustrated the problem: continual calls and emails about inspections, coupled with the need to reconcile requests with a landlord’s or tenant’s availability.
Having the customer there to explain the process helped the team understand what would make a useful difference.
Third place went to Ray White Mildura’s Launch IQ, which focused on improving listing preparation before a property reaches the market.
Its prototype brought together property details, photographs and REA data to help agents prepare and review a listing, including the information and presentation intended to reach prospective buyers.
Across the three projects, the proposed benefits were tangible: less document preparation, simpler enquiry handling and more informed campaign decisions.
IM360 received a $30,000 Advantage Plus AI Acceleration Grant, with $20,000 awarded to Agent Angel and $10,000 to Launch IQ. Each remaining participating customer received $5,000.
REA Chief Technology Officer Steve Maidment said the grants would help customers accelerate the use of AI within their own businesses.
The projects were presented as prototypes, with further development needed before they could become available products. Maidment said REA would build IM360, with planning to determine how it would fit into the commercial teams’ work.
For Connell, customer participation helped shorten the distance between the people experiencing a problem and those able to solve it.
“They’ve got designers, marketers, like these are real cross-functional teams,” he said.